lighthouse
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sigp
Prune historic blocks
Description
Currently Lighthouse stores every block from genesis to the current head, with no option to drop the older parts of history.
The p2p spec defines a parameter MIN_EPOCHS_FOR_BLOCK_REQUESTS equal to ~5 months, which we could adopt as the default backfill period for new checkpoint synced nodes.
https://github.com/ethereum/consensus-specs/blob/dev/specs/phase0/p2p-interface.md#consensus-layer-network-interaction-domains
If community consensus enables it we could also automatically prune blocks older than MIN_EPOCHS_FOR_BLOCK_REQUESTS on all nodes in real time. Assuming finality and no storage of historic states this would make the size of the database approximately constant :heart_eyes_cat:
On the backburner, we're hesitant to add this feature without opt-in from other client teams and a good solution to providing access to the historical data.
Syncing from checkpoint sync doesn't store all blocks, just the minimum we need to serve. I'm going to close this in favour of block pruning in #4158
